Interview with Gabby Nizri, CEO and Co-Founder, Ayehu

An official member of Forbes Technology Council, Gabby has nearly 20 years’ experience in technology innovation. His multidisciplinary background in product engineering, sales and professional services brings together key elements necessary to deliver the company’s IT process automation solution that has proven to be a force multiplier for businesses facing operational IT and cyber security challenges. Gabby held various operational and management positions at successful Israeli technology enterprises including Infogate Online Ltd, Webmaster and Walla Communications Ltd.

Named by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Ayehu’s IT Automation and Orchestration Platform powered by AI is a force multiplier for IT and security operations, helping enterprises save time on manual and repetitive tasks, accelerate mean time to resolution, and maintain greater control over IT infrastructure. Trusted by major enterprises and leading technology solution and service partners, Ayehu supports thousands of automated processes across the globe.

Tell us about yourself and the journey to founding Ayehu.

In 2007, I co-founded the company with Ayehu’s Chief Technology Officer, Yaron Levy. It was a time when businesses were trying to keep up given the great strides that were being made in the IT field. Technology was becoming increasingly complex even for large global corporations, and given our experience working with the demands of the 24-hour IT world, we wanted to build something robust, yet simple to use to help manage enterprise technology and still be able to focus on the business. We saw automation as the answer. We put together the team and built software that eliminates many typical time-consuming, repetitive tasks for an IT department, such as password resets, server restarts and responding to system alerts. As the company grew, we expanded our team globally. Today, we are headquartered in San Jose, with offices in New York and Tel Aviv and continue to grow our customer and partner relationships to extend the benefits of our intelligent automation platform.

Tell us about the Ayehu team.

Ayehu was founded in Israel, where innovation and entrepreneurialism are part of the business culture. Our expert R&D team, responsible for developing our cutting-edge platform, resides there. Our sales and marketing team members, focused on driving the expansion of our global businesses, are primarily located in the US, in our San Jose and New York City offices. Our team is a mix of highly talented, passionate and motivated set of professionals, who are driven to make a significant impact on today’s businesses. We are a very engaged and cohesive team because we are all inspired by the results our technology brings to customers.

How does Ayehu’s technology leverage AI to make automation smarter?

Ayehu’s intelligent Automation and Orchestration Platform is powered by AI. The platform incorporates Machine Learning algorithms that help make the process of automating IT and security tasks even smarter by generating AI-based recommendations for users, in the form of two-way SMS and email notifications. The user can self-manage his needs by conducting intelligent conversations with chatbots as opposed to having to wait for humans in L1-L2 to resolve his/her problem. Our customers can build any workflow they wish, to automate repetitive tasks that are performed manually, such as a workflow for automating the process of provisioning a new server or a workflow for resetting passwords. The user simply uses Ayehu’s simple-to-use drag and drop pre-built templates to build the process. No coding required. And based on prior history, the AI component contributes by proactively suggesting additional ways to streamline the process to make it even easier, faster and more accurate.

Ayehu serves hundreds of companies around the world. The beauty of IT automation and orchestration is that organizations in virtually any industry can benefit from the solution. Ayehu’s customers range from telecommunications companies and technology enterprises to healthcare organizations and insurance agencies.

What kind of repetitive tasks can one hope to automate; how does working with Ayehu’s technology solutions affect ROI, human error and response time?

There are many IT and security tasks that organizations can automate resulting in huge efficiencies. We typically find the top five tasks to be restarting applications/servers, monitoring application log files, remediating low disk space, resetting passwords and provisioning virtual machines.

Ayehu acts as a force multiplier, resulting in incredible operations efficiency that is generated by saving time on manual and repetitive tasks, accelerating mean time to resolution, and maintaining greater control over IT infrastructure. It is an agentless platform that does not require any coding or scripting to use. It is easily deployed and interoperates with disparate solutions and systems so that tasks and processes are easily and very quickly automated.

It (the technology) can improve response times by up to 80% while simultaneously reducing human errors by up to 90%, and even potentially eliminate them all together.

Ayehu’s automation and orchestration capabilities extend beyond IT operations to security as well. Tell us more.

Even today’s biggest corporations can’t keep up with the influx of security incidents and compliance requirements. The shortage of qualified security technology professionals is a serious and growing challenge. Ayehu’s platform automates the cybersecurity incident response process so that response times to security breaches are dramatically improved, reducing financial impact to the business. While it is not always possible to completely prevent cyber-attacks, automating the incident response process is proven to vastly accelerate the ability to identify, isolate and remediate the breach, minimizing potential damage. 64% of our customers using us in the IT environment have pulled us into their SOC environment.

With Ayehu, Security experts can fully automate and mimic the response of experienced security resources, including complex tasks across multiple, disparate systems, executing thousands of well-defined instructions and playbooks without any programming required, helping to resolve virtually any alert, incident or crisis.

Tell us about Ayehu’s partners, and what other enterprise technologies it integrates with.

To be truly effective as a process automation solution, we recognize that the platform must integrate with a large ecosystem of partners so that customers can effectively use it in their existing environments. We work with all the major ITSM, ITOM, NOC, SOC, AI, chatbots and messaging platforms. Ayehu acts as the glue among all these systems so that customers can very easily deploy AI-powered automation and get fast and dramatic results.

Ayehu is the only AI-powered, IT Automation and Orchestration solution that requires no coding or scripting and is integrated with all other existing systems in your environment. Ayehu is designed to empower IT and Security Operations teams so that CIOs can begin creating the self-driving enterprise.

Ayehu harnesses the power of AI to deliver a transformative experience for today’s modern corporations.

How can SMEs take advantage of Ayehu’s cloud and IT management solutions?

Ayehu’s next-generation IT Automation and Orchestration Platform can be used on-premise or in the cloud. It is SaaS-ready and optimized for hybrid deployments to meet current needs.

What’s next for Ayehu; what can we look forward to?

Ayehu is passionate about empowering the self-driving enterprise through intelligent automation. As we look to the not so distant future, we believe strongly that advanced technology will be the game-changer that drives new innovation that transforms the world we live and work in today. We will continue to advance the AI-driven automation platform and form partnerships that extend the benefits to even more organizations around the globe.

Thank you, Gabby! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.

Authors

Yolande is a journalist with seven years of experience with mainstream newspapers like Times of India, DNA and MiD DAY. She has covered culture, music, science & technology, edited books on ergonomics and written scripts about start-up junkies. In her spare time, she makes up stories about evil robots.

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